tator audio, which allowed her team
to focus on the pit crew. “I leaned on
those NASCAR broadcasts to give
us context for those races. The announcers do such a good job of telling you what is going on. This meant
I could focus on what’s happening
behind the scenes. I’m capturing the
impact that the race is having on the
crew. I’m capturing what is happening to our characters,” says Hill.

With the Sanken COS-11D lavs,
Hill found that she could pick up
both sides of a conversation. For example, the lav mic on the interior
mechanic would pick up the driver’s
replies. That came in handy because
Hill couldn’t mic the drivers during
the race. “There was a big concern
about safety issues and NASCAR is
very strict about not putting anything onto the drivers’ fire suits or
into the cars, period. So the interior
mechanic was my source for capturing audio with the driver since he
was the one that was sticking his
head into the car. The Sanken mics
gave me access to the driver when
I couldn’t put a microphone directly
on him,” she says.

Hill was also able to tap into
the headsets used by the driving
team. She recorded their communications onto a Zoom H4N digital
recorder. Additionally, the cameras
were recording with either external
AKG SE300B with the CK93 (
cardioid) capsule or an Audio-Technica
AT875.

During editorial, Hill and her
team, series editor Tom Vickers
and head assistant editor Eli Van
Noppen, combed through all of the
dialogue sources, from Hill’s recordings, the camera tracks, the second
unit’s audio tracks, the NASCAR
broadcasts, and the racing team
headsets, to pick out the threads of
the stories she wanted to tell. There
were so many audio tracks that at
one point they maxed out their version of Avid Media Composer. “At
times, it looked like a science experiment on the screen with all of those
channels. It was really complicated,”
says Hill.

She pulled the story together
using real-time material captured of
the event as it was happening, plus Cynthia Hill with sound engineer Mark Barroso
Director of photography Blaire Johnson on location